NVIDIA has been trailing AMD in terms of graphics performance and features since the launch of the Radeon 5000 series late last year. Missing the holiday shopping frenzy undoubtedly hurt, and AMD has enjoyed being the sole purveyor of DX11 hardware for six months. In late March, NVIDIA finally answered AMD with their launch of the desktop GTX 480 and GTX 470. While they did surpass AMD in raw gaming performance, the victory was not without a cost—specifically, the GTX 400 cards use a ton of power and run quite hot. Imagine our surprise, then, when we heard that GF100 chips would be going into notebooks next month.

We're told that the total graphics power draw (GPU + RAM) for each 480M MXM is 100W, which is higher than the 75W draw of the GTX 285M. While the GTX 480M will in theory support Optimus Technology, it's unlikely any vendors will actually implement Optimus. We expect the majority (all of them?) will go the discrete-only route as quad-core mobile i7 processors don't have the requisite IGP, and pairing the top-end GTX 480M with a Core i3/i5 would potentially introduce CPU bottlenecks. We expect with the GPU running constantly battery life is likely to be in the ~1 hour range, but that's typical of the gaming notebook market. Far more important than battery life is the performance characteristics, and here's where NVIDIA should trump AMD's Radeon Mobility HD 5870 quite handily.

Like the desktop GTX 400, the GTX 480M puts a heavy focus on tessellation hardware and compute shaders. NVIDIA states that the 480M will deliver "up to five times" the tessellation performance of any other GPU, though how much that will truly matter remains to be seen. GTX 480M will also support the usual slew of NVIDIA features like CUDA, OpenCL, and PureVideo, and it will be part of the Verde Driver Program. On the desktop, the additional shader performance does appear to be the main reason NVIDIA is ahead of AMD, with an average lead of around 15% at high resolutions. In DX11 titles, the lead is often even greater, coming in at 20 to 25% faster. With that in mind, let's look at what the GTX 480M offers.

GeForce GTX 480M Specifications

CUDA Cores

352

Graphics Clock (MHz)

425

Processor Clock (MHz)

850

Texture Fill Rate (billions/sec)

18.7

Memory Clock/Effective (MHZ)

600/2400

Standard Memory Configuration

GDDR5

Memory Interface Width

256-bit

Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)

76.8

CUDA gigaflops

598

PhysX capable

Yes

OpenCL support

Yes

PureVideo HD 1080p Full HD

Yes

H.264, VC1, MPEG2 1080p video decoder

Yes

Full spec Blu-ray decode

Yes

DirectX 11 support

Yes

DirectCompute Support

Yes

OpenGL 2.1 support

Yes

OpenGL 3.2 support

Yes

Windows Vista, XP and 7

Yes

GDDR5 support

Yes

LCD – LVDS support

Up to 2048x1536

VGA analog display support

Up to 2048x1536

DisplayPort multimode support

Up to 2560x1600

HDMI 1.4 support

Yes

HDCP content protection

Yes

7.1 channel HD audio on HDMI

Yes

PCI Express 2.0 support

Yes

SLI Ready

Yes

Package

MXM board

(Note: Some of the above figures may be different from what you'll find on NVIDIA's current spec sheet. We spoke with NVIDIA to confirm the numbers, and what we have posted should be correct. It sounds like there was a math error/typo initially, so the GFLOPS data is correct and we have clarified the memory clock information.)

Beyond the obligatory DX11 support, the paper specs of the 480M look to be a good sized jump over the previous generation GTX 285M. CUDA Cores have increased from 128 to a whopping 352, which could mean a dramatic increase in performance. It's interesting to note that with 352 shader cores, that means NVIDIA is disabling five of the available 16 "Streaming Multiprocessors" we discussed in our GF100 Architectural Overview. 352 is still a big jump from 128, but we have to keep clock speeds in mind as well. The GTX 285M had a core clock of 576MHz with a shader clock of 1500MHz, and up to 1020MHz GDDR3 memory (2040MHz effective). The GTX 480M has a core clock of 425MHz, a shader clock of 850MHz, and 600MHz GDDR5 memory (2400MHz effective).

The old G90 architecture at the heart of the GTX 285M could do three shader operations per clock; the GF100 does two per clock, which means that the raw GFLOPS isn't particularly faster when you factor in clock speeds. Memory bandwidth on the other hand has increased by around 20%, despite the relatively tame 600MHz base clock of the GDDR5 memory. If we look at the desktop GTX 480, we can see that even with less texture fill rate and only slightly more memory bandwidth, the other architectural changes resulted in a performance increase ranging from 20% at the low end to as much as 75%, with the average being around 50% faster. We would expect a similar performance increase with the GTX 480M compared to the previous generation 285M. Given that the mobile HD 5870 is only slightly faster on average than the GTX 280M, it looks like NVIDIA is set to retake the mobile performance crown.

Beyond offering better performance, the new 480M also provides full support for 3D Vision displays. Notebooks with dual-link DVI output will be able to drive 120Hz panels without any problem. Likewise, the internal LCD can be a 120Hz panel, and we'll likely see some notebooks with 3D displays down the road. SLI is also possible, though it looks like notebooks with 480M SLI won't be out for another couple of months.

Availability of notebooks with the GTX 480M should start next month, with the first units coming from Clevo. What we don't know yet is pricing information, but if the past is any indication we expect the GTX 480M notebooks to command a pretty penny. Being the fastest notebook on the block is one thing, but what we're interested in seeing is a well-balanced answer to notebooks like the ASUS G73Jh. Also worth noting is that the mobile DX11 at present consists of a single top-end GPU, whereas AMD has top to bottom DX11 support.

That would be interesting, to say the least. The power consumption numbers of this part are rather astounding (at least in the Desktop market). I'd like to see how nVidia has managed to make that tolerable (though the lower clock speeds seems to be one answer).

This is a part that is screaming for Optimus, IMO. Couple that with a reasonable CPU (something in the i5 range), and you've got a potent combo.

If CUDA hype is to be believed, then (nearly) everything that you need a quad core CPU for (crunching highly parallel-izeable instructions) is easily accomplished via the GPU (and anything that supports "DirectCompute" at that). I suppose that I never really understood the need for a quad core notebook computer, particularly given what the vast majority of people use their desktops for, and given what marketing says about CUDA...Reply

Updated the text with additional information. The total graphics power (GPU + RAM) of the GTX 480M is 100W, so that's higher than the 75W of previous solutions (GTX 285M). However, there may be better power saving features on the GTX 480M so idle power requirements might be about the same. Given vendors have already started talking about 480M SLI, the power draw is obviously nowhere near as high as the desktop GTX 480 (or even GTX 470)... but then performance is a pretty big step down as well.

I imagine the GTX 480M will offer around half the performance of the desktop GTX 480. The desktop part offers 125% more shader performance, texture fill rate, and 130% more memory bandwidth. Half of the GTX 470 might be a closer estimate.Reply